By Rachel Maidl
UWM Report
September 30, 2025
Priya Nambisan was deep in her career and raising a family when she noticed some changes in her health. She had researched the relationship between health and technology for years but was about to experience their impact firsthand.
“I called my physician, and I was sweating,” said Nambisan, associate professor of health care informatics at UW-Milwaukee’s Zilber College of Public Health. “I described all of my symptoms, and she told me to ‘hang up the phone, call 911, and don’t drive.’”
The strange symptoms that Nambisan had been experiencing all semester were coming to a crescendo. Now her doctor feared a heart attack.
Nambisan raced to the ER. She was lucky — doctors determined it wasn’t a heart attack, but an anxiety attack.
“I had so much stress,” Nambisan said. At the time, she was under pressure to publish articles and procure grants, while caring for 2-year-old twins without much family support. “Like many other women, my health took a backseat,” she said.
Tracking tools for a healthier tomorrow
As a researcher, Nambisan looked toward data to pinpoint the habits that led to her health issues. And she turned to a familiar tool: Excel.
She tracked a number of factors, including work and home-life stress, diet and resting heart rate. She recognized that the act of tracking habits allowed her to manage stress and make positive changes. It inspired Nambisan to create a comprehensive health tracking app called My Healing Ecosystem for Self-care & Therapeutic Integration for the Aging (myHESTIA).
Nambisan says that there are plenty of apps for conditions ranging from diabetes to mental health issues. MyHESTIA is different because users can track multiple chronic conditions in a single application. It’s an important tool for aging populations — many of whom may not be tech savvy — because they only need to learn how to use one app.
She also uses the anonymous data from the myHESTIA app to study how tracking health factors can improve patient outcomes. Nambisan says that tracking and monitoring is an integral part of self-health management, but people need the right tools to do it accurately and effectively.
“Mentally, keeping track doesn’t work. Your brain cheats, and it’s too much information to keep in your head,” Nambisan said, noting that writing it down — whether in an app or an old-fashioned notebook — is the best way.
She has tested the platform in pilot studies and received grants to fund larger studies. Describing one such study, Nambisan noted that many young people in India move for their careers, leaving aging parents behind. They use apps like Facebook to stay in touch and share pictures, but sharing health information is difficult. The Fulbright-funded study, conducted in India, focuses on how adult children can remotely monitor their parents’ medical conditions to better support their care.
Another study that uses the myHESTIA app, funded by the Bader Foundation, tests the platform with early stage dementia patients and their caregivers.
Research on social media and at-risk youth
As the director of the Social Media and Health Research & Training (SMAHRT) and Aging Research & Digital Technologies (ARDT) labs at UWM, Nambisan works with students to conduct a range of research projects using data from myHESTIA, social media platforms and artificial intelligence.
In 2024, Nambisan and Lance Weinhardt, associate dean for research, were awarded a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how social media use affects suicide rates among at-risk youth.
Nambisan’s recent NIH-funded work focuses on LGBTQ+ youth, who are most likely to consider or attempt suicide — and most likely to seek help on social media. The study lets participants capture what they see online and how it makes them feel.
“It’s a very difficult research topic to study due to the complexities of suicide and a lack of clarity in the causes of suicides,” Nambisan said. And, it’s difficult to study the impact of social media when people see and perceive so many different things.
Nambisan and her fellow researchers use AI to help sort through the data and unravel those complexities. Based on this stream of her research, Nambisan has been invited to speak about the topic at schools and with parents who have lost children to suicide. It’s a topic that’s hard for her to talk about, but she’s hopeful that her research can make a positive difference in this area.